Friday, October 12, 2012

Unwind

          I took a break from Miss Peregrine's for now. These past couple of weeks, I've been reading my absolute favorite book Unwind. I've read this book a thousand times, and each time I read it I find something new that I love.

         If you haven't read Unwind already, I highly recommend it. It is a story set far in the future, after a second civil war. This war was fought over the Pro-Life and Pro-Choice issue. Unwinding was the solution they came up with. The new law stated that you could not touch a human life from the time of conception until the child turns thirteen. Once the child turns thirteen, the parents can choose to have their child unwound. To be unwound is to be taken apart and salvaged for your body parts. The parts are used for medical purposes. For example, if someone gets into a car accident and loses a leg, that person can get a brand new leg from a kid that has been unwound. Parents can choose to have their child unwound until the day the child turns eighteen.

        There are no chapters in Unwind. The book is split up by going back and forth between characters. The three main characters are Connor, a troublemaker whose parents were tired of dealing with; Risa, an orphan who was nothing more than a budget cut for the state; and Lev, who was born to be unwound based on his parents' crazy religion. They are brought together by coincidence and stay together because they are each other's best chance of surviving.

       This book... I can't even express how much I love it. It's perfection. The idea is original and interesting. There's action, suspense, creepiness, humor, love (but not too much), and everything you could ever want in a story. It's organized perfectly, written beautifully, and it's the kind of book that you just can't put down. The author, Neal Shusterman, is my favorite author. I've read a majority of his books and I think this is his best work. He did a great job of making the reader really care about what happens next.

      The thing I love most about this book is that it answers all your questions really well. A lot of authors will creat mystery about a certain thing in their story and just leave it like that, and let the reader "use their imagination." I think that's just lazy. Shusterman doesn't do that. Throughout the book, you read about how mysterious the actual process of unwinding is. The characters think and talk about what they think might actually go on in the "Harvest Camps" where Unwinds go to be taken apart. This question is built up for the entire story, and while most authors wouldn't bother explaining it, Shusterman takes you behind the doors of the Chop Shop and into the mind of a character while he is being unwound. This is my favorite part of the book, probably because it's a little bit terrifying.

      And I say again, if you haven't read it before, and you like books with interesting concepts and good plot lines, then you should definitely read Unwind.


  

1 comment:

  1. After reading about how much you like this book, I want to read it. You really set it up withot giving the whole plot line away. Really good job, I like that you keep reading this book because it shows how much you like it!

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